Contact centers manage customer interactions between businesses and customers. Historically, the customer interactions were handled by telephone for the customer by a human agent. A current trend in customer service is to use and push customers towards other forms of customer service interactions. The other forms of interactions don't necessarily require human agent involvement. Using these other forms of interactions saves time and reserves resources for customers who do need the human agent to complete a transaction.
Social media and email channel interactions are increasingly being used for technical support, answering questions, and providing information. With these two channels, customers often ask one or more questions on one or many topics and carry on multi-turn dialogs within the framework of a single interaction or dialog. Sometimes the multi-turn dialogs span multiple channels, like a social media public post, a social media direct message, an email, and/or an instant messaging session. With multiple questions, multiple answers, multiple channels, and multiple parties involved, determining when the interaction is over and which items remain unresolved becomes important and may be complicated and time-consuming for a contact center agent.
Contact center agents typically manage these interactions and dialogs. Agents who respond to written forms of complex problems are highly skilled, expensive, and are in high demand with limited availability. A significant amount of agent time is required to determine which items and sub-items have been addressed and which ones have yet to be resolved. The problem gets even more complex as the email channel iterations increase and the comments increase on social media.